Utah longitudinal autism MRI (NDA 1906 and 2400)

This is a long-running University of Utah study of brain development in autism, led by Janet Lainhart. It began in 2003 with males aged from early childhood to adulthood and has rescanned them every few years since, adding new participants at later waves. Its imaging, clinical and neuropsychological data are deposited in two NIMH Data Archive (NDA) collections: 1906, "Atypical Late Neurodevelopment in Autism", and 2400, the extension that continues the cohort into adulthood. The study has also been called the Interdisciplinary Science to Learn about Autism (ISLA) project.

Composition

NDA reports 174 shared subjects in collection 1906, 165 of them with records in the Image data structure, and 211 shared subjects in collection 2400, 124 of them with image records. The two collections share participants, and NDA does not publish how many people appear in both, so no combined total is given here. Shared clinical structures include ADOS, ADI-R, IQ tests, the Social Responsiveness Scale and many neuropsychological and questionnaire measures.

The papers describe analysis samples rather than the NDA release. A 2021 volumetric paper used 607 T1-weighted scans from 105 males with autism and 125 typically developing males, aged 6 to 45 at first scan and scanned up to five times between 2003 and 2019. A 2015 diffusion paper used one to four scans each from 100 males with autism and 56 controls aged 3 to 41. Collection 2400 planned a sixth time point and a reading disorder comparison group; a small pilot group of females was added at the fourth wave.

Acquisition

Waves 1 to 5 were scanned on a Siemens Trio 3 T: sagittal 3D MPRAGE with 1 to 1.2 mm slices and a 12-direction diffusion tensor sequence (b = 1000 s/mm², repeated four times), with an 8-channel head coil at the first wave and a 12-channel coil afterwards. From December 2016 to April 2018 the cohort had multiband multi-echo resting-state fMRI on a Siemens Prisma 3 T; NDA lists a resting-state fMRI experiment in collection 2400. Some young participants with autism were sedated at the first two waves.

Known limitations

The cohort is almost entirely male and comes from one site. Scanner hardware changed between waves. NDA does not itemize which scan types, formats or visits the shared image files contain. Access requires an approved NDA data access request.